GigaPan provides nutritious eye candy for the classroom and the curious.

As I can attest firsthand, one of the biggest obstacles to getting students engaged in geology courses is being stuck in a classroom. It’s a science meant to be taken in by striding up hills and with a liberal application of hammers. And while it’s immensely beneficial to tackle the basic principles using simplified models and diagrams, it's hard to really appreciate them until you’ve seen them in the stony flesh, connecting with an unfamiliar Earth that's millions or even billions of years in the past.

In a world of tight class schedules and even tighter budgets, opportunities for excursions to the field are few, so the challenge is to bring as much of the outside world into the classroom as possible. Recently, a new tool has made it a little easier for educators to do just that.

That tool is the beautiful, explorable imagery created by GigaPan. The technology uses motorized mounts that guide a camera through snapping hundreds of high-resolution pictures that cover a predefined area. The images are subsequently stitched together to build a gigapixel (or more) scene that makes a standard panorama look like it came with a kids’ fast food meal.

Randy Sargent, along with a number of colleagues, started developing the technology at NASA. “I had been working on visualization software for panoramic images for Mars rovers (Spirit, Opportunity, and the K9 prototype rover at NASA Ames), and I got completely hooked on immersing myself in the zoomable Mars imagery—‘teleporting to Mars,’” he told Ars.

They quickly realized that it would be just as cool to explore unfamiliar places on Earth in this manner. So they set out to build the tools necessary for people to create these images themselves. Given the number of potential scientific and educational applications, the team reached out to support the early adopters who were willing to give it a try.

Detail and context

Geologists were among the educators who were trained and then unleashed on the world as voracious GigaPanners. Ron Schott, who teaches at Bakersfield College in California, has been sharing his experiences with GigaPan through his blog. Schott had been exploring better ways to help students visualize geologic concepts, and GigaPan has fit the bill. “In the classroom, students exploring a GigaPan can experience a joy of discovery that just isn't there in a traditional static photograph,” he told Ars.

Callan Bentley, an assistant professor at Northern Virginia Community College and fellow geoblogger, shares that view. “I think the key aspect of a GigaPan is that it is a single medium which combines both detail and context. The result is that viewers/users can start with the literal ‘big picture’ (zoomed-out) context, then let their natural instincts guide them to explore for detail in select portions of the image (zoomed-in),” he wrote.

Take the GigaPan at bottom, for example. At first, one takes in the large-scale structure: folded layers of rock. But you can also get up close, as you would on a field trip. Take a look at individual layers—their color, texture, varying resistance to weathering, and the wavy, small-scale folding present within the larger fold. Just don’t whack the screen with your rock hammer.

There’s something very satisfying about exploring an image in that way. Callan Bentley calls it the “Where’s Waldo?” instinct. “Whether the medium of their exploration is real life or a virtual maze, or a big photo (as in GigaPan), people like checking into the details.”

The broader appeal of GigaPans is not just that instructors can bring local outcrops into the classroom, but that they can access points of interest around the world. Students could take a virtual trip to, say, the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls in the same class, making it easier to illustrate concepts with examples students already know about. Students could work to piece together the geologic story of an area by examining several related outcrops at the same time, or work through directed activities like this exercise in correlating rock layers.

While you can’t normally fit an outcrop into the classroom, every geology department has its collection of rock samples. Still, some collections aren’t as rich as others—and none of them do much good if you’re trying to teach a course online. GigaPans can be useful here, too, allowing students anywhere to closely examine beautiful specimens of crystalline textures or delicate sedimentary features.

Geology isn’t the only field that has found a use for GigaPans. Randy Sargent told Ars, “We have geologists, archaeologists, ecologists and botanists, conservationists, entomologists, cosmologists—and NASA Ames continues to use the work as well, for prototype robotic explorers.”

These images aren’t just for academics, either. “GigaPans make scenes accessible to many who are physically or financially unable to experience the scene themselves,” Ron Schott wrote. “For example, I've never been to Antarctica, but I've gotten a much better sense of what it must be like by exploring it through GigaPans. If that isn't good outreach for all of the publicly supported scientific programs in Antarctica, I don't know what is.”

Just spent Thanksgiving with my brother the geophysicist, so we took a little hike to collect some rocks. This is not the same, but the idea is cool. I'll let him know about it. This is really neat, but like my brother says, "I wish I had a hammer with me."

Have we solved the problem of getting Giga anything down an affordable consumer pipe in a reasonable amount of time?

Yes, for the viewer at least - I know the guy who wrote the original flash viewer for GigaPan, and it's very similar to Google Maps. The image is broken down into regions, and it only sends as much data as you're actually viewing. If you're zoomed out, you're just seeing a "thumbnail" of the whole image, and as you zoom in it sends higher resolution chunks of the parts you can see.

Have we solved the problem of getting Giga anything down an affordable consumer pipe in a reasonable amount of time?

Yes. I bought my wife a gigapan system and if I remember correctly it was about $299. She is one of the "colleagues" that works on the M.A.G.I.C project and wanted one of her own. she doesn't have the super nice model for DSLR cameras but it works great. We took it on a vacation recently and it made it all worth it. Now all I need to do is get the rig over to Dubai and shoot some really interesting photos from the top of the Burj Khalifa.

Interesting article, but it read a bit like ad copy. I would hope for a "deeper" treatment - e.g., more technical details on the underlying tech, or "broader" - e.g., comparison of this to alternative ultra high-res imaging technologies. Take it for what it's worth, it's just one reader's opinion.

While I have not I used or created "GigaPan" images. I have used Microsoft Photosynth and other tools for my geology class to create virtual field locations in the State of Washington. One of the interesting things of using tools like Photosynth is that while lower resolution, I can create pseudo 3D imagery of the location including different perspectives from multiple capture points. In combination with capturing images, I have tried to collect representative samples, so students will be able to work with real rocks from these sites as well.

I also had students create their own virtual field sites as well as part of student projects using tools like EverNote to allow them to capture images using smartphones. They can then go back and add notes, geologic maps, and other information to their virtual field sites.

I think all of these efforts on collecting real world imagery are extending opportunities for use in the classroom. Obviously, the higher the resolution the more work that can be done with each site.

Is this new tech? I thought it had been available for some time now ... not that I'm complaining about being reminded of it. I'm a total novice but I LOVE hi-res panoramas (PhotoSynth and ICE FTW!) ... looking at the prices they're all really quite affordable! Hmm....

Is this new tech? I thought it had been available for some time now ... not that I'm complaining about being reminded of it. I'm a total novice but I LOVE hi-res panoramas (PhotoSynth and ICE FTW!) ... looking at the prices they're all really quite affordable! Hmm....

It's not new tech, but these are somewhat novel uses - and lots of people still haven't heard of it.

Anyone else think the resolution is actually pretty poor at the zoomed levels?

"But you can also get up close, as you would on a field trip. Take a look at individual layers—their color, texture, varying resistance to weathering, and the wavy, small-scale folding present within the larger fold."

I zoomed in to try and view the individual layers, and was fairly disappointed with the resulting resolution (had a fogginess to it) - obviously there's a limit here, but I couldn't get to the point they described in the article, where I would feel as though I was standing at the rock formation. I think the micro-scale imagery is just as important here for the intentions of the software.